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Hotaches – A Step Into The Unknown

On Saturday night I was at The Climbing Works, (how lucky am I to live near the biggest and best bouldering wall on the planet!). However I wasn’t climbing. A few months ago Paul Diffley from Hotaches Productions (responsible for a long list of very good climbing films over the years) approached me about a fairly radical idea he had about launching his new film Odyssey. He wanted to put on a world premiere, sell DVD’s, and also make it available for free online for a limited amount of time. He basically wanted to create a bit of a buzz about the film. It’s a fairly grass roots film about rad climbing in the UK. I wrote a short review of it a couple of weeks ago. As such he didn’t want red carpet, sparkling drinks and a posh cinema. He wanted a grass roots venue, which is exactly what the Works is. It’s a climbing wall, with a big screen and decent sound system (Sam, one of the directors, insisted!), and its easy enough to rent in a decent high def projector and Bluray player. At the same time as the film kicked off to an audience of around 200 folk on Saturday night Paul clicked a switch to enable the film to be streamed online for free for 10 days. It’s a bold move. Some will clearly watch it online in the next week and will be satisfied with that. The hope is that they will figure that it’s actually worth buying either to add to film collections, or to give as Christmas presents, either as a permanent download (£8.99) or on DVD (£14.99). £8.99 is a round for two and a half people down the pub. I think that it’s a nice idea to offer a film for an amount that doesn’t seem steep. Since the explosion of smart phone apps I’ve become much happier to spend small amounts of money online and I hope that others will feel the same and buy the film. Paul’s taken a risk, and if we want more of his films he needs supporting.